Op-Ed: South Carolina Primary, where Jim Crow government still rules

Life in South Carolina under Jim Crow laws have been a common practice for most of the southern United States. The purpose was to keep certain citizens from voting---poor whites, Native Americans and African Americans--through political corruption.

This segment of society has been dissatisfied with South Carolina voting for a long time, going back to early days when "whites voted Republican and blacks and poor people voted Democrat."

For those who lived in the early days of Jim Crow government, the back side of politics is easily recognized. Gingrich called Obama the food stamp president. Whether it was true or not did not matter. That was not the purpose. The remark was made because Obama is partly African American, he is a Democrat, and he is dead-set against poverty. And it is obvious that the Republicans have put crazy ahead of insane to remove President Obama from office. But this is nothing new for the Republicans, especially toward Democratic presidents.

"The impeachment and trial of President Clinton showed how crazy the Republicans can get. They hated Clinton more than they loved America," according to Australia's Melbourne Business School.

The truth of the matter is, most of the American people using food stamps are not African-American, and most people using food stamps have a job. They are just not making enough money to pay their bills and put food on their tables at the same time, due to job shortages and the inability of Congress to get along to develop new jobs.

According to Money.CNN, "Food stamp enrollment has been rising for more than a decade. President Bush launched a recruitment campaign, which pushed average participation up by 63% during his eight years in office. Nearly the same number of people -- 11 million -- joined the program during the Bush and Obama administrations, according to Department of Agriculture records. Of course, the jump during Obama's tenure has come in only three years."

Decrease of voting rights for the most vulnerable

The Koch brothers are part of an aggressive campaign to end the voting rights of some of the most vulnerable groups in American society. These billionaire brothers are bankrolling an effort to deny the most fundamental American right to 21 million citizens in 2012, written in the Stand4Freedom website.

Alternet reports that the primary target today for controlled voting rights are the Black, Latino, Asian American and Native American voters, as well as students and young people, seniors, working women, and immigrants of all colors. These are also among the voting demographics who are most likely to support workers rights, equal opportunity, women's rights, LBGT rights, environmental protection, and peace.

"Minority voters in Mississippi are used to devices and voter registration tricks that were used to try to keep them off the voting rolls. They looked at what was being proposed and decided this was not in their best interest and rejected it pretty overwhelmingly," said Bob Kengle, co-director of the Lawyers' Committee's Voting Rights Project. "It can be hard, I'll admit, to tell the difference sometimes between racial politics and partisan politics, in Mississippi and other states in the South especially, but there's a very clear racial dimension to this when you look at it in the historical context," said Huffington Post in the January 12, 2012, article "Mississippi Voter ID Law Rejected Overwhelmingly By Blacks, Supported By Whites."

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Benjamin Todd Jealous, current president and chief executive officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), spoke to The Slate in a telephone interview last Saturday, "Our country is a country in which the political logic assumes that most poor people are black and most black people are poor." The NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States.

The political logic he refers to could be based on specific things, one of which is the large number of African-Americans in prison, with documentation showing that the beginning of the government drug control was targeted toward African-Americans alone.

"Today there are more African-Americans under correctional control — in prison or jail, on probation or parole — than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began," according to Michelle Alexander, an associate law professor at The Ohio State University.

This opinion article was written by an independent writer. The opinions and views expressed herein are those of the author and are not necessarily intended to reflect those of DigitalJournal.com